Tuesday, February 10, 2015

The profit-propaganda curve, and more

Roissy: the profit-propaganda curve. A lot like social class generally except the top classes in our society are now rabid lefties, parlor pinkos (for thee and not for me, because I know what's best for thee; now get off my turf). The struggling/ascending have no time or resources to do other than sell their product or service; the insecure middle class pushes the crap (peer-pressure liberalism and the threat to their jobs if they don't do it); and then there's "making it": Once a business reaches the level of F*ck You, Money, its interest in abiding prevailing Hivemind norms wanes. I'm free in that I never use the work computer for editorializing (typical company rule) and my job doesn't involve my opinions (I don't write for work anymore); I carry out and keep track of production schedules. I wear my conservatism (it's not kitsch); I don't preach it. A month and a half into the job, they don't know my views on religion, politics, or sex, and I plan to keep it that way.

Burke for Pope. Making the rounds: I shall resist. We can and should do that if necessary. I'm not saying it is right now (vs. the sedevacantist scenario, which can happen). Because it's about our teachings, not the Pope's person. I'm not too riled up because I know our teachings can't change; "the Pope can't break things" as one of my detractors puts it. But isn't the Pope the point of being Catholic? The church is best when it's local, but per St. Paul our message is universal, not tribal, and the Popes even at their worst have only defended core Catholic teaching. So I'm in the church for eternity, both objectively (baptism and confirmation are forever) and by choice. And contraception and divorce & remarriage don't make sense in Christianity, so no to the non-Catholic Christian East.

A reading from Tripp Hudgins, a mainline minister and proud of it: I consider Protestants to be those who are in historically rooted denominations which began as a corrective to the church. Lutherans were trying to correct the church. Some would argue Anglicans were also trying to correct the church. The Calvinist Reformed movement? Obviously. Megachurches aren't trying to correct anything. They emerged from a world with a multiplicity of Christian expressions and have no problem with that. Only the most fundamentalist of them have trouble with Catholicism or Orthodoxy. The Southern Baptist Convention is the only Protestant denomination in the United States that still has the political will to insist that it is the true church and everyone else is wrong. Everyone else is simply participating in an immigrant church. Well put, but sure, the megachurches think they're correcting the church. They're not in it!

This is one of these things that angers me about certain strains of Christainity, always seeking to make people feel guilty about having things that others are not fortunate enough to. The people on the left would still be starving even if those on the right were eating bread and water. I find it very hard, if not impossible, to have guilt for things that are completely beyond my control as a human being. Furthermore, the idea that God will somehow punish the people on the right for being fortunate enough to have things that those on the left don't sounds very cruel and unjust to me.

Ex-Army: is laissez-faire fair? One thing that mainstream libertarianism shares with liberalism is a naive notion that all constraints on human behavior are somehow unfair or mean or evil... On one hand, God-given common sense can eventually produce spontaneous order (social Darwinism?), usually far better than state-planned economies, however well meant (the lesson of Juan Perón, for example); on the other, there's original sin. So unlike libertarians I'm "a man under authority" as the centurion in the gospel was (Domine, non sum dignus): God, his church, and the civil authorities the Byzantine Liturgy prays for in its Litany of Peace. (There's the issue of the Byzantines historically being subservient to the state, but anyway. Like "the two kingdoms" our Lutheran cousins talk about.) Truth, not anti-authority daddy issues. The libertarians have the no-harm and non-aggression principles (residual Christian ethic: as long as you don't harm another), but doing whatever you want is bad for you personally and societally, as even the libertine-sounding Roissy admits in principle. What we are seeing in America is the fruits of a false religion: a Christian heresy.

LRC: still good when it doesn't fall into the line that Ex-Army warns about.

The middle class is shrinking as America falls. We're turning into the Third World minus the nationalism, with a few of the super-rich with no social loyalties to countries, etc., and a lot of the very poor.